


if the story is true

by animus_wyrmis



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-24
Updated: 2011-04-24
Packaged: 2017-10-18 14:36:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/189902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/animus_wyrmis/pseuds/animus_wyrmis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Susan and Edmund watch The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and Susan almost believes it's true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if the story is true

**Author's Note:**

  * For [songsmith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/songsmith/gifts).
  * Inspired by [In Stony Places](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/3073) by Lady Songsmith. 



> Thank you to rthstewart for the beta!

The film shows in greens and blues, turquoises and purples and golds. Susan curls herself into the hollows of Edmund's side and eats more popcorn than she should while he whispers comments in her ear. "I don't like the hair on him," Edmund says once, and also, "Look at that!" and again, "I don't remember any bloody swords."

Coming out of the theater they meet a world of grey-white fading into black. Susan dodges the children milling about and fixes her collar. Evening has fallen, and the night is cloudy and starless, the clouds like smoke reflecting off the snow and slush and casting the world in an unfamiliar half-light. Susan shudders at the sudden cold and Edmund lifts her up, over a puddle, like a dance. His hands linger around her waist like a brand.

+

"Wasn't the landscape beautiful?" Susan asks. She lets her sleeve brush against Edmund's and studiously examines the slush lining the sidewalk. Her mind, absently, flashes again to the long, straight line of the sea against the sky.

"Gorgeous," Edmund agrees.

"I wonder how accurate it was?"

"Perhaps we'll see for ourselves someday," Edmund suggests, thinking, no doubt, of Lucy. But Susan has doubts of her own. If the story is true, the voyage will take place without her. If the story is true, she will travel across an ocean, but Edmund will travel across a world. She laughs instead, lightly.

"Oh, I don't know," she says. "Travel is wonderful, but I don't think I'd want to go to the end of the world like that." It is not a rationalization, not a lie, but it is true as soon as she says it. The end of the world is far away, and anyway that world is closed to her.

+

"Blasted slush," Edmund snarls, kicking at it.

"At least it's a mild winter," Susan says, her mind caught between the deep snow of another world and the horrid cold of last year.

Edmund shivers. "I'd rather the blizzards," he says.

"You don't mean that," Susan says. Snow, like mist, brings memories. If the story on film is true, there are memories Susan has put aside that Edmund will never forget. She hopes this is something, like the swords and Caspian's hair, that the film has got wrong. Otherwise she thinks that she and Edmund will always be divided: forgiven and not, forgotten and not. For some time she has thought that Edmund's ease of memory would be worth his guilt, but now she is not so sure. "It will be spring soon," she adds, but Edmund isn't listening.

+

"Hardly anyone's entertaining this year," Susan says when she has exhausted all other topics of conversation. When did it become so difficult to talk to her brother? Was it before or after she and Lucy began to pass each other like ships in the night, with a nod but nothing else?

"Saving up for Christmas parties, I expect," Edmund says without looking at her. His way of telling her he wants something else from this conversation. Something Susan isn't prepared to give.

"I think I've enough coupons for a brand-new dress this year," she says instead of what he wants. Perhaps she will give the one she wore last year to Lucy and help her make it over. Does Lucy compare herself to Susan the way Susan compared herself to their mother? The last time Susan grew up she remembers Lucy growing up in the sun, away from Susan's shadow, away even from the castle. She remembers their adolescence as a perpetual spring, perpetually noon. She wants to say to Lucy, _You are just as pretty as I am, in your own way_. Princes used to court her, Susan remembers. There was a Galman prince with a ship, once, and Lucy had laughed and twirled in a dress the color of the sea. In that moment she was the most beautiful girl Susan had ever seen.

But she does not think that Lucy would believe that, anymore, even if Susan could find a way to say it properly.

"That's good," Edmund says, and by the time Susan remembers what he's talking about he's looking away again.

+

Susan isn't looking where she's going, and the patch of ice trips her up. Edmund catches her arm and steadies her, something he's done a million times in _that_ world but not in this, and she pulls away. Things that seemed proper in the ballrooms at Cair Paravel seem out of place here, and Edmund's steadying hands are no exception.

"Almost home," he says glumly. Susan can just barely see the roof of their house, dark and washed out like everything else. She feels, suddenly and unfairly, that there is no place she would less like to be. But the night is too cold to linger.

"No, we're not," she says, simply, breaking her own code of silence. But Mother's tense and brittle smile and Father's moods are too far from her own idea of home. She misses Cair Paravel.

Edmund doesn't say anything in response, and she avoids his eyes. Even if she could go back, Cair Paravel is in ruins. Perhaps Caspian will rebuild it, but Susan does not trust that he will get the angles right, or the stones. She shakes her head to clear it, and takes in grey, slushy Finchley once again.

+

She finishes Edmund's cigarette with her eyes shut, savoring the last breath, and then pinches out the stub and watches the ashes scatter across the yard, black against the dim half-light.

"That’s it, then," she says, meaning the film and the evening and the walk, and, she thinks, her own journeys into memory. Narnia is shut to her and even Edmund and Lucy will never stand on its shores again.

"It doesn't have to be," Edmund says, looking at her with so much hope that it nearly breaks her heart. "Su--" he starts, and she knows this cannot go on.

"Oh, Ed, haven't we already crossed that bridge?" she asks. She is so tired--tired of England, tired of this meaningless second life, tired of the pressing questions. _Do you remember_ , they ask her, until Susan wants to scream, _Yes! Yes and I would like to stop!_

"Bridges can be crossed in two directions," Edmund tells her as if no one has ever realized that before.

"Not if they burn behind you," she snaps. Not if God pulls them down behind you. Not if the doors are all shut. She pushes past him, into the house, and when Lucy asks how the film was, Susan can only say, "Fanciful," with more scorn than she means.

Later, she hears her brothers' voices downstairs, and Lucy's laughter, but she stays in her room with the door shut and her eyes closed, replaying the end of the film in her mind, Aslan's voice, his eyes, the heartbreak on Lucy and Edmund's faces. Only a story, she reminds herself. Susan knows stories; this one will have been changed to make it more satisfying. It isn’t a prophecy, and she shouldn’t take it as such.

Still, she dreams of it that night. In her dream, her bedroom fills with salt water the color of Lucy’s long-ago dress, and Susan chokes on it until she thinks she may drown. When she finally surfaces Aslan is looking at her mournfully from the bow of a great ship. “Welcome home, Daughter,” he says, and she wakes up.


End file.
